The 2016 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association took place at the start of November. Over 20 Rotman members took part in the meeting — presenting papers, chairing sessions, and taking part in the poster forum. A detailed list of member involvement at the 2016 PSA was previously published on our blog.
The final lecture of our annual library lecture series also took place at the start this month. The series was part of our annual theme for 2016, The Brain Boom: How Neuroscience is Changing How We Understand Ourselves, and consisted of four talks: Catherine Stinson, The Body in ‘Mental Illness’; Jackie Sullivan, Understanding Mental Illness: Will a Single Explanatory Model Do?; Chris Viger, Brains and Persons; and Louis Charland, Why Neuroscience Needs “Passion”. Catherine Stinson’s talk was recorded, and the video can be viewed on our YouTube channel.
A listing of other notable member activities for this past month are listed below in alphabetical order.
- Rotman alumnus Justin Bzovy posted a new publication, Aristotelian Species Pluralism on PhilSci-Archive.
- A book review by Rob Corless and Nic Fillion, A Graduate Introduction to Numerical Methods: From the Viewpoint of Backward Error Analysis, was published in the journal of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Review.
- Craig Fox gave a presentation titled, The Newtonian Equivalence Principle: How the relativity of acceleration led Newton to the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass, at the 32nd Boulder Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science, Gravity: Its History and Philosophy, held in Boulder, Colorado on October 28-30th.
- A paper by John Jenkinson, “Enactive subjectivity as flesh” was published in the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences in October.
- On September 23-24th, Catherine Stinson attended KenFest — Reductionism and Integration, Bioethics and Behavior: A Conference Celebrating the Career of Kenneth F. Schaffer. Ken Schaffer was her PhD advisor at the Center for Philosophy of Science, in Pittsburgh.
- A paper by Jackie Sullivan titled “Construct Stabilization and the Unity of the Mind-Brain Sciences” was recently published in Philosophy of Science.
- On October 31st, Kyoko Wada was invited to present her paper, titled Decision-Making Capacity to Consent to Medical Assistance in Dying for Persons with Mental Disorders (co-authored with Louis Charland and Trudo Lemmens), during the hospital ethics committee meeting at St Joseph’s Health Care London (Parkwood Institute).
Pictured above: Craig Fox at the 32nd Boulder Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science. Included in the photo (left to right): Monica Solomon (Notre Dame), Robert DiSalle (Western University), Alan Franklin (CU Boulder), Craig Fox (Rotman Institute, Western), and Adwait Parker (Stanford).
